In 2025, digital tools are one of the most powerful tools in any company’s arsenal. That’s particularly true if you’re in the mortgage lending game.
McKinsey recently reported that 72% of mortgage customers start their loan journey online. Fannie Mae has similar findings. Not only are people using more digital resources to find the right mortgage loan, but Fannie Mae reports “aspirational technology use,” meaning the number of folks looking for a digital mortgage experience should continue to climb in the coming years.
That means that in order to maximize revenue, your lending institution should be thinking through some mortgage website best practices. Here are five ways to build a high-converting site in 2025.
#1: Leverage current rates leverage
When consumers visit your website, they might be trying to learn a bit about your company and your team. Usually, though, their focus is on what that company and team can do for them.
By providing them with the latest mortgage rates, you get immediate wins. For starters, you show the prospective lead that your team is knowledgeable about the current mortgage environment. Additionally, you demonstrate that you’re willing to share that expertise to benefit them. That’s why current rate tables are a must when it comes to mortgage website best practices.
Plus, delivering this information to leads can be a lot easier than many mortgage pros expect. The latest rate tables integrate directly with your product pricing engine (PPE). As rates update in your PPE, they update on your site, too. No one from your team needs to get tasked with manually maintaining the rates.
Instead, you get a way to drum up leads that can run automatically. This delivers the lead gen website mortgage lenders want.
#2: Guide the flow of visitors
When people come to your site, they’re already judging your company. You want to provide them with a digital mortgage experience that feels as personalized and helpful as the one your team provides in person.
That means giving visitors a quality user experience. Your site should help them navigate around and get the information they want.
Lead workflows give you a fantastic way to do precisely that, delivering the lead gen website mortgage teams need.
With a lead workflow, your website visitor gets a step-by-step process to navigate, sharing pertinent information like their homebuying budget and buying timeframe. In a process that takes about 30 seconds, they have a way to get the personalized information they want (i.e., a tailored rate quote). And in exchange, you get their contact information so your loan officers can move that lead forward.
#3: Give them something personal
Today’s consumers expect a personalized experience. 81% say they prefer companies who tailor the experience to them. That’s why personalization is one of the leading mortgage website best practices.
You can meet or even exceed this expectation from your leads by giving them a bespoke digital mortgage experience. With their own customer rate dashboard, leads can see all of their personalized rate options in one place.
Better yet, they can customize their own loan scenarios, allowing them to see how different decisions affect their loan. Allowing them to play with their down payment amount, for example, can help them equip themselves with information. By the time they talk to one of your loan officers, they should have a clearer idea of what works best for them. This can make the lead even easier for your team to close.
#4: Tap into SEO
A lot of the mortgage website best practices we’ve covered help you move site visitors toward becoming leads. You also need to take steps, though, to get visitors to your site in the first place.
For that, you can turn to search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO means taking actions to help your website rank higher on search engines like Google. This way, when people are looking for information about home loans, they’re more likely to come across your company. If you then provide a high-quality digital mortgage experience, you have a decent chance of capturing that person as a lead with a high probability of closing.
SEO is fairly complicated, and it means taking steps that affect both how your website looks and functions (on-page SEO) and the role your site plays in the larger ecosystem of the internet (off-page SEO).
To make this more manageable for mortgage lending institutions, we’ve built some guides. The first outlines some things you can do if you want to rank higher for the keyword “mortgage rates.” Since that's a priority for most lending teams, we thought that was a good place to start.
Secondly, we have a more in-depth guide to on-page SEO. Some off-page SEO factors fall somewhat outside your control, like external links that feed back to your site. But you have full control of the on-page factors, so they’re a great way to create the lead gen website mortgage teams need.
#5: Make your team easy to reach
Finally, never forget that your website is just one piece of the puzzle. While consumers increasingly like to explore their options online, there’s no shortage of folks who want to talk to a real person. That's particularly true when it comes to major financial decisions like getting a mortgage.
As a result, even as you focus on delivering a stellar digital mortgage experience, work to give your site a human touch, too. Creating dedicated pages for each of your loan officers helps here.
This way, potential leads can see who they’ll be working with if they choose your lending institution. Just as importantly, make sure those loan officer pages have clear contact information. Prominently feature phone numbers and email addresses for each loan officer so people can get directly in touch — and become a captured lead for your team.
With these mortgage website best practices, you should be able to create a website that delivers notable lead generation. If you want help adding tools to create a high-converting site — including rate tables, lead workflows, customer rate dashboards, and loan officer pages — contact us. Our team at BankingBridge has developed all of these tools so they’re easy to deploy on your site. This way, you can deliver a digital mortgage experience that helps your team generate more leads and close more loans.